A client sits across from me and tells me about the conversation with their manager for the third time in as many sessions, and about a minute in, at the same point in the story, their right hand closes on the arm of the chair and stays closed until the story is over. They have told this story to a partner, two friends, and a therapist before me, and it has been understood every time, and the hand still closes.
That is where somatic coaching starts: at the point where the account is accurate and complete and has not changed anything. I am a coach, not a therapist, and what I do does not replace therapy where therapy is needed, but there is a kind of stuckness that talking by itself has not moved, and the body is usually carrying the part of it that the talking left out.
Slowing down enough to see the hand
The method I trained in is Hakomi, a mindfulness-based, body-centered approach developed by Ron Kurtz in the United States beginning in the late 1970s. Its first principle is mindfulness, which in a session means something specific: we slow the pace down until present experience can be studied while it is happening, rather than narrated after it has passed.
Instead of asking what happened with the manager, I ask whether they would be willing to notice the hand, without changing it, and to tell me what they find there. We wait. The room has a lamp and a window and the small sounds of the street, and the client, who has been talking at the speed of the story, drops into the one the hand is moving at, which is much slower. What they usually find is that the hand is doing a job, and the job has a sentence attached to it, and the sentence has been there longer than the manager has.
Little experiments
The core technique is something Kurtz called a little experiment. I might say a sentence while the client stays in that slowed-down attention, something like “you can rest now,” and ask them to notice what the body does when the sentence lands. The body answers faster than the mind: a tightening, a breath, a reflexive no from somewhere below the collarbone. Or I might ask them to let the hand open one finger at a time, or to let me hold it closed so that it does not have to do the work, and to notice what changes.
None of this is interpretation; the experiment is a question put to the body in its own terms, and the answer comes back as sensation, which we study together with the same slowed attention. Over a handful of sessions the hand gets to say what it has been protecting, and the client hears it from the inside rather than from me.
Nonviolence, which means not pushing
Hakomi’s second principle is nonviolence, or non-forcing, and in practice it means that when the hand will not open, we do not make it open. The resistance is as much a part of the material as the thing being resisted, and usually the more informative half. If a client tries the sentence “you can rest now” and the whole torso says no, then the no is where we go, and the session becomes about what the no has been doing for them all these years. A coach who pushes past that no in the name of a breakthrough gets a client who performs the breakthrough and keeps the hand.
Organicity, unity, and the stance
The remaining principles are organicity, which holds that a person’s system knows the direction it needs to go and the practitioner follows rather than steers; and unity and mind-body holism, which hold that the person in the chair is one system rather than a mind riding a body. In the room these amount to the same thing: I am not the one who knows what the hand should do.
What I am responsible for is the stance Hakomi practitioners call loving presence, which is less sentimental than it sounds and more demanding: the warmest, most attentive regard I can bring to who the client is, before and independent of what they want to fix, kept visible, since the nervous system in the other chair reads my face faster than it hears my words, and a body that reads safety will show things it will not show otherwise.
What a first session looks like
We talk the way people talk, and at some point I ask whether you would be willing to slow down and notice something; if you say yes, the session changes speed. There is no table and no touch unless it has been offered as an experiment and you have said yes in that moment. You stay in charge of the pace. If what comes up is beyond the scope of coaching, I say so and help you find a therapist.
The client with the closed hand is a composite, but the hand is real, and I have seen it on the arm of the chair enough times to know that it opens on its own schedule and never on mine. A discovery call is how to find out whether this way of working fits what brought you in. Details at /coaching/.